Happy Birthday, ClearPoint Strategy!

As we celebrate ClearPoint Strategy’s seventeenth birthday, we’ve taken time to reminisce on our journey, the core mission that has driven our progress, and the unique place we've carved out in the landscape of strategy execution.

ClearPoint was born from a simple yet powerful idea: to create a software that seamlessly integrated the complexities of strategic planning and performance management into a single, coherent tool. Our co-founders saw a gap in how organizations managed their strategies and envisioned a platform that could eliminate the inefficiencies of disconnected tools and manual processes, providing leaders with a comprehensive view of their goals and the means to achieve them.

At the heart of its functionality is the idea of making data accessible whenever decisions need to be made — all within a single system. We’ve been reflecting on that system’s growth, our customer-centric community, and the incredible team behind the success.

Here is our story.

Our Story

ClearPoint Strategy is a cloud-based strategic planning and performance management software designed to help organizations execute strategy and track performance metrics. It offers a comprehensive management reporting platform that enables businesses, governments, nonprofits, and more to track projects and align day-to-day activities with high-level strategic goals. Our software is often described as a Balanced Scorecard and strategy execution tool, reflecting its foundation in strategy management best practices. In short, ClearPoint allows organizations to develop strategic plans, track key performance indicators (KPIs), manage projects and initiatives, and generate reports in a single integrated system. By consolidating all these functions, the system helps break down data silos and ensure that strategic objectives remain linked to measurable results across an organization.

Founded in 2008, ClearPoint Strategy has grown into a trusted solution for strategy execution with a diverse user base. ClearPoint is used by over 15,000 users worldwide, across organizations large and small. Our ClearPoint Community ranges from city governments and healthcare systems to financial institutions and enterprises. Our core mission: “We make management reporting simple and efficient so you can focus on making better decisions.”  In line with this mission, our purpose is to remove the friction from the reporting and strategy monitoring process, enabling leadership teams to spend less time compiling data and more time analyzing results and making fact-based decisions.

ClearPoint’s origin story begins with our founders – Ted Jackson and Dylan Miyake – and their vision for a better way to manage strategy. Both founders brought deep expertise in strategic planning and performance management. Ted had been a Vice President at Palladium Group (formerly the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative) where he led global sales for a strategy management software and consulted on the Balanced Scorecard framework. Dylan, likewise, was a VP at Balanced Scorecard Collaborative and had worked closely with Drs. Robert Kaplan and David Norton (creators of the Balanced Scorecard) since 1997. Through these experiences, they saw firsthand how organizations struggled to implement strategy: they observed that many organizations relied on fragmented tools and manual processes to track performance, leading to inefficiencies and lost opportunities for improvement.

Ted and Dylan decided to tackle this problem head-on. They founded ClearPoint Strategy, envisioning a software solution that could serve as the “better duct tape” holding strategy execution together. At the time, no single tool fully realized that vision. Organizations were stitching together emails, spreadsheets, and slide decks to review their strategic plans, often resulting in wasted time in meetings and decisions based on outdated or incomplete data. This insight became the driving force behind ClearPoint.

The goal was to build an application designed “by managers and executives, for managers and executives,” to facilitate decision-making and ensure strategic efforts were managed to completion. In other words, ClearPoint would fill the gap left by generic business intelligence tools by focusing specifically on strategy execution needs: providing context (the “why” behind the numbers) and encouraging follow-through on plans.

Ascendant Strategy

The early development of ClearPoint Strategy was closely tied to a consulting firm our founders also established, Ascendant Strategy Management Group. Ascendant, founded around the same time, specialized in helping nonprofits and public agencies implement the Balanced Scorecard and improve their strategy management processes. ClearPoint started as a product developed by Ascendant’s team to support these consulting clients, and by integrating their consulting expertise into the software design, Ted and Dylan were able to ensure that ClearPoint was not just another dashboard tool, but a holistic strategy management solution built on proven frameworks. In fact, ClearPoint explicitly supports Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard methodology out-of-the-box, reflecting our founders’ background. Early versions of the software allowed organizations to create strategy maps, define objectives across the four Balanced Scorecard perspectives, link measures and initiatives to those objectives, and evaluate progress in a structured way.

From its founding, ClearPoint was bootstrapped and self-funded, which influenced the growth trajectory. Growing organically through client success and reinvestment meant our founders could focus on long-term product quality and customer satisfaction—rather than short-term investor demands. By January 2010, our private company had a functional product in the market and was releasing new features regularly. The Winter 2010 release introduced major enhancements like interactive strategy maps (allowing users to upload custom images and overlay status indicators), one-click Excel and PDF exports for any data table, and improved alignment views to show how department-level measures roll up to enterprise goals. These early improvements were driven by user feedback and a desire to cover all key aspects of strategy reporting in one tool.

Government Agencies

A significant milestone in ClearPoint’s history was achieved in February 2012, when ClearPoint Strategy obtained a GSA Schedule 70 contract with the U.S. General Services Administration. This contract allowed federal, state, and local government agencies to purchase ClearPoint software and services more easily without a lengthy, competitive bidding process. The GSA contract win illustrated the credibility and maturity of the product in the eyes of the public sector. At that time, ClearPoint was described as “a web-based balanced scorecard, dashboard, and performance management software solution” enabling leadership teams to manage strategic plans, strategy maps, measures, and dashboards in an easy online interface. Government agencies saw value in ClearPoint to translate strategy into action by managing strategy review meetings, automating performance dashboards, and tracking key projects. Early adoption by government clients (many through Ascendant’s consulting relationships) set the stage for ClearPoint becoming a popular choice among city and county governments.

Throughout the 2010s, ClearPoint Strategy expanded its features and client base. The company’s headquarters moved to Arlington, Virginia. New modules and capabilities were added: for instance, integrations with other data systems, more advanced analytics, and later on, capabilities for Objectives and Key Results (OKR) management. Our development philosophy has been to keep the tool highly flexible and customizable to adapt to different management methodologies. By the late 2010s, ClearPoint was not only supporting the classic Balanced Scorecard, but any other framework out there, and capabilities for data security and user access control were introduced to cater to enterprise needs and teams as well.

Our Values

Our emphasis on better decision-making is rooted in the idea that strategy execution and performance management should go hand-in-hand. The ClearPoint platform was built to ensure that data (quantitative metrics as well as qualitative analysis) is always aligned to strategy and readily available when decisions need to be made. In practice, organizations use ClearPoint to create strategy maps and scorecards, update their progress on goals and measures regularly, and review these updates in structured meetings. By having a dedicated system, they avoid the common pitfalls of managing strategy with general-purpose tools like Excel, PowerPoint, and email – tools which often lead to siloed data, version control issues, and unproductive meetings. Instead, ClearPoint Strategy provides a single source of truth for strategic performance, helping to promote transparency, accountability, and a culture of continuous improvement.

We pride ourselves in being customer-centric and results-driven. Our company culture values customer success, and our team is willing to do whatever it takes to help our partners succeed. Our core values drive our operations, and translate into high-quality support and continuous product improvements year after year:

1. We care about the customer
2. We play to win
3. We are passionate
4. We are exceptionally open
5. We are welcoming

a mission-driven software firm: its mission is to simplify strategic management for organizations, and its product is the embodiment of that mission, delivering an all-in-one strategy execution platform that drives better decisions and better outcomes.

Our Community

Customer Success

Alongside product evolution, our team has achieved several noteworthy recognitions. ClearPoint maintains a 5-star user rating on Capterra and G2, even listed in Gartner’s Market Guide for Strategy Execution Management Software for three consecutive years, indicating strong customer satisfaction and signaling ClearPoint as a prominent industry player in the strategy execution software category.  

Our award-winning customer success team sets a high standard for service quality. In 2020, the team won a Bronze Stevie® Award for Customer Service Department of the Year, and in 2023 it was honored with a Silver Stevie® Award in the same category. These American Business Awards reflect ClearPoint’s commitment to supporting its users – judges specifically commented on “excellent and timely customer support” and cited the remarkable statistic that 99.2% of ClearPoint’s support cases were rated as Highly Satisfied or Satisfied by customers. Such recognition is rare for a small software company, and it underscores a key differentiator of ClearPoint: a dedicated, hands-on support team that works closely with clients to ensure success.  

One of our core values as a company is Care About the Customer... we’re committed to constantly helping our customers achieve their big organizational goals with ClearPoint.

– Joseph Lucco, VP of Customer Success

This customer-centric ethos has been part of ClearPoint’s identity since our founding, and continues to drive its positive reputation.

Public Sector

Another area of recognition has been ClearPoint’s strong footing in the public sector and local government space. Our company was named a two-time winner of the ELGL Haverford Award in 2020, an honor given by the Engaging Local Government Leaders organization to the top companies serving local governments. As #4 on the ELGL Haverford list that year, it indicated that many local government professionals vouched for ClearPoint as an outstanding partner.  

ClearPoint’s influence can also be seen in the success of our government clients – three out of the five city winners of the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award have credited their performance management (using ClearPoint) as a factor in reaching excellence.

These milestones collectively highlight ClearPoint’s growth from a startup vision to a recognized leader in strategy management software. Over roughly a decade and a half, we’ve proudly served hundreds of organizations while staying true to our founders’ original vision: building a robust product and a loyal community of users who genuinely benefit from improved strategy execution.

We ❤️ our #ClearPointCommunity!

Our Product

Today, ClearPoint Strategy continues to innovate and adapt. We regularly roll out updates, constantly experimenting with emerging technology like artificial intelligence (AI Assistants) to help our partners plan and execute more efficiently.

Coming Soon: introducing ClearPoint Next, a more modern version of ClearPoint than ever before!

As we release new features, the core premise remains unchanged since the founding days: ClearPoint exists to make the complex process of strategy execution easier, more data-driven, and more collaborative. The founding story of ClearPoint – from two strategy consultants frustrated with the status quo, to a specialized solution now used by mission-driven organizations – is a testament to how a clear vision and commitment can build lasting value.

As we mark another year of innovation and success, we are grateful for the trust placed in us by organizations around the globe. Our journey from a simple idea to a leading strategy execution platform is a testament to the hard work and dedication of our team, and the continuous feedback and support from our users.

Here's to more years of making strategic management easier, more collaborative, and data-driven. Happy Birthday, ClearPoint Strategy! May we continue to drive better decisions and better outcomes for many more years to come.

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